Our Summer 2025 series, Beside Still Waters, focuses on the places where creativity brings life into a world fatigued by brokenness and division. From jazz to Jane Austen and in between, this season we’ll focus on the ways literature and the arts can refresh and challenge our inner lives—and connect us with the Creator of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
Our guest this episode is the poet Christian Wiman, a master of the written – and spoken – word. After long wandering, he returned to the Christian faith in which he’d been raised, in part because of a terminal cancer diagnosis – one he has now long outlived. Both before and after his diagnosis, and his return to faith, his experience of despair has fueled his powerful poetry. In grappling with it, Christian uses words in ways that are a tonic against despair.
This podcast is drawn from an online conversation from 2024. We hope this conversation will resonate with you as you explore the good, the true, and the beautiful in your own corner of creation.
If it does, please consider joining the Trinity Forum community as a member, at ttf.org. You can find the full video of this conversation there too. And while you’re here, please subscribe to this podcast on your chosen platform.
Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:
Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, by Christian Wiman
Marilynne Robinson
Danielle Chapman
William Bronk
William Wordsworth
Every Riven Thing, by Christian Wiman
My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer, by Christian Wiman
Prayer, by Carol Ann Duffy
The Bible and Poetry, by Michael Edwards
Augustine of Hippo
Bittersweet, by George Herbert
Surprised by Joy, by C.S. Lewis
Richard Wilbur
Jürgen Moltmann
When the Time’s Toxins, by Christian Wiman
Related Trinity Forum Readings:
Devotions by John Donne, paraphrased by Philip Yancey
God’s Grandeur: the Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins
Bulletins from Immortality, by Emily Dickinson
Wrestling with God, by Simone Weil
Related Conversations:
Connecting Spiritual Formation & Public Life with Michael Wear
The Kingdom, the Power & The Glory with Tim Alberta
A Life Worth Living with Miroslav Volf
Towards a Better Christian Politics
Christian Pluralism: Living Faithfully in a World of Difference
What Really Matters with Charlie Peacock and Andi Ashworth
Scripture and the Public Square
How to be a Patriotic Christian
Life, Death, Poetry & Peace with Philip Yancey
The Fall, the Founding, and the Future of American Democracy
Fear and Conspiracy with David French
To listen to this or any of our episodes in full, visit ttf.org/podcast and to help make content like this possible, join the Trinity Forum Society.